Okay, so I'm an aspiring lifelogger. In any case, I have lots of thoughts that I hope people will find helpful (I also hope that people will comment on them as well).
In any case, external hard drives are the most important element of lifelogging. Of course, the price of storage is going down. What are your strategies with respect to procuring external hard drives? There are some cheap deals you can occasionally find at slickdeals.net.
Another thing: choice of location. Places prone to destructive natural disasters are some of the worst places to lifelog. Unfortunately, this includes where I'm living now (Seattle), as my city is prone to earthquakes that could destroy my external HDs. I'm thinking about how to protect them in case of an earthquake (avoid putting them on tables whenever possible, maybe using some insulation? Putting them inside counters so that the ceiling won't break it if it falls on it? But then the counter could fall on it too.
Anyways, what else is there? I like web services that improve data portability (and which make it easy to back everything up). Basically, google and wordpress are very desirable. Services that want to "archive" everything and believe "more data=better" also are good (so google is one of them). One concern with google, though, is that it has a lot of servers in earthquake prone regions like California and The Dalles (Oregon is overdue for a supermassive earthquake, and *very* few people will be prepared for it, although The Dalles will certainly be a lot farther from the epicenter than Portland). I know that it uses redundant data storage, but a supermassive earthquake on the southern portion of the Cascadia fault could possibly destroy servers in *both* Oregon and Northern California (I don't think the Palo Alto area is part of that fault though, although it, too, is overdue for a good-sized earthquake).
Anyways, that was sort of a digression. As for programs, there's CamStudio, although I'm not logging things on my desktop yet for lack of another external HD (I'm still debating over whether I should get a lifelogging-exclusive HD when HD prices are still falling). For the occasional computer game, I'd prefer ZDsoft game recorder to FRAPS if ZDSoft Game Recorder didn't crash all the time.
Metadata collecting applications are also quite desirable IMO.
I also massively use Httrack and DownthemAll since I'm all too familiar with websites that have been taken down, and horrified at all their lost archives. I also tend to save webpages rather than bookmarking them (google desktop is nice), although I'd like a chrome (or firefox) extension that gives me the option to simultaneously share and save the page (as HTML only) at the same time.
But what sorts of tips do you have? One thing I *really* hate, is the recent trend towards Javascript-based web applications like Twitter and Facebook, that don't store information within HTML files. As a result, it's impossible to save all your profile information through DownThemAll or Httrack, since both of them are incapable of dealing with JavaScript (the recent explosion of robots.txt protocol usage is making Httrack useless for many websites these days). The recent Firefox Add-On iMacros can help *a bit* with this (it can auto-save pages that use the perpetual "find more" button), but it's a lot less convenient and you have to spend time to manually update it for each profile you want to save.
Edited by InquilineKea, 11 January 2011 - 10:32 PM.
